Google Lenz came out in 2017 and it's a way of using the camera on your phone to understand a lot more in your surroundings now I haven't really heard a lot of people talking much about it but it's something I use a lot every day and so I thought why not show off exactly what Google lens is and how it works and what you can do with it let's check it out so let's talk about how you access google lens let's start with iOS over here on an iPhone 10 R there are two ways to
do that you can use the Google app and you'll see this lens icon right here in the search bar and that's how you can just turn on google lense alternatively you can also go to the Google Photos app to find the lens icon right here and that's what we have here on the 1 plus 7 Pro and you can tap the Google lens icon over here to get its magic working now there's other ways of accessing Google lense on Android phones basically it's built into the phones because Google assistant is available and you can do
this by just accessing Google assistant and when you move up you'll see the Google lens icon right here press it and you'll get access to Google assistant and of course several Android phones already have google lens baked right into the camera app that's like here on the Google pixel 3a you can access Google a lens straight through the camera app so I just got out of a meeting and I got someone's business card so I don't really want to add all of this information manually into my phone but Google lens can help with that and
expedite the process so all I need to do is point the camera with google lens open at the business card and it will scan the card and understand all of the text so now all I need to do is tap on various texts and it'll give me things to do like if I tap on this person's Twitter handle I can copy the text or I can search it if I tap on the email address it'll give me options to email that person directly or add that person out of the contact and if I tap on
the address I can navigate directly there if so desired so basically makes things a lot faster and act more accessible just I'm looking at a business card we just got these plants in the office and I don't really know what they are Chim Chim midoriya elegans commodore e elegans well i didn't confirm with the receptionist that that is the exact name for the plant i just don't know how to pronounce it now say you're walking down the street or you're in a subway and you just see something you really like whether it's a shirt shoes
a carpet a sofa whatever really google lens can help you find out what that is all you need to do is take your camera open up through the lens and point it in at for example the pink sneakers that I'm wearing from Nike and you'll see these little circles popping up all you need to do is tap on them and you'll get a feed of similar-looking products and there we go that's exactly the pair that I'm wearing right now so it definitely works and is very accurate but of course you might have to sift through
a few other options and this works for more than you know clothing you can also do it for furniture if that's something that you want like say this chair and you really like it just point google lens at it tap on the circle and I will get similar if not almost Inc this is actually this is exactly the same thing that's sitting right in front of us so again you can tap on it and you're getting an option to purchase it from a retailer one thing I really like using google lense for is to find
out what buildings or landmarks I'm looking at and this has really worked well in the past for things that I really didn't expect your glance to figure out like in really old church or something like that but of course it'll also work with the more well-known landmarks like the Empire State Building now all I need to do is point it at the building and sometimes I might need to tap on the Empire State Building and there you go I tapped on the circle next to it and it says Empire State Building you can share the
details you can call the Empire State Building you can get maps directly to it you can search if you want to just find more about it and there are some pictures over here as well that will show you some of the views from the top of the building as well as reviews of the placing in case you're thinking about visiting as well sometimes you want to find more information on a photo that you may have taken beforehand well if you're in Google photos the google lens icon is there that's my dog and google lens can
also help identify breeds Indian Spitz American s qo dog Volpe know potentially a mix of all that and some comparison pictures to dogs that look similar and you know I don't really know what my dog is but all of these came up in when when asking around so pretty close I guess but with dogs it's never really going to be that accurate now google lens can also do real-time translation which is handy if you're you know in a new country you don't really speak the language currently we're gonna do a quick translation on the text
there in the subway and I have set it to French and just by pointing at it you can see it automatically changing the text right there to french whether that's accurate well I called someone who I know that speaks French and she said she doesn't know if it's grammatically accurate but it more or less makes sense by far one of the coolest things you can do with google lens is finding the best things to order on a menu that other people like and the way you do that is getting through the lens out and going
to the dish's option and basically just point it at the menu you can see it orchids magic now this is a new feature so not all restaurants will have this working perfectly and not all options will be ready but it should be pulling this option from the internet and you can see it pulled up grilled cheese and it's choosing what people are saying about Panera's grilled cheese specifically so that's pretty neat that you can get real-time options for reviews right there or right as you're looking at the menu so that's Google ends it's pretty impressive
and certainly very helpful in day to day scenarios already with just being 2 years since its launch and I can't imagine what it's going to be like in five years at the rate computer vision is progressing